Parliamentary Contests Research Articles

Reflections on the 2022 elections in France

ABSTRACT This article analyses, explains and evaluates selected key aspects of the 2022 presidential and parliamentary elections in France. It covers the first five-year term of President Macron, the presidential campaign, the results of both rounds of the presidential election, and the subsequent parliamentary contest at which the re-elected president failed to win a majority for his reform agenda. The article also examines the impact in both elections of the far right under Le Pen’s leadership and the left under Mélenchon’s.

French Revolution? The 2017 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections

The 2017 French presidential and parliamentary elections were among the most eventful in the history of the Fifth Republic. Both elections saw a rejection of the two political forces of Left and Right that had dominated electoral politics for decades, with neither candidate from the Socialist Party or Les Republicains even qualifying for the second round of the presidential contest. Instead, the second-round run-off was between a newcomer to electoral politics, Emmanuel Macron, and the standard bearer of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen. Macron’s success was followed by the victory of his new party in the parliamentary contest. Yet, while political renewal was an outstanding feature of both elections, in several key areas President Macron’s reformist agenda represents a significant degree of continuity with the practice and policies of previous presidents.

Expect the unexpected: the 2017 French presidential and parliamentary elections

The 2017 French presidential campaign was in many respects very different from all of its predecessors in the Fifth Republic. The same might also be said of the parliamentary contest that followed a few weeks later. Both elections were characterised by two complementary features – le dégagisme and le renouvellement – that together contributed to the sense that in 2017 French politics underwent a radical transformation, including a major shake-up of the party system and a significant renewal of the political class in both the executive and the legislature. In this vein the article analyses key features of both campaigns, selectively using comparator reference points from previous Fifth Republic elections where appropriate. In contrast, in the concluding section on the early weeks of the Emmanuel Macron presidency, the article highlights important elements of continuity with previous presidencies in terms of leadership style and policy initiatives.

Elections without recognition: presidential and parliamentary contests in Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabakh

While various debates have arisen on the relationship between non-recognition and democratization, empirical case studies on elections in de facto states are extremely rare. This article examines recent presidential and parliamentary elections in two unrecognized or partially recognized de facto states in the South Caucasus, namely Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabakh. Accordingly, the emphasis is on the Abkhazian presidential elections of August 2011 and August 2014 and parliamentary elections of 2007 and 2012, along with the most recent executive and legislative elections in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) in July 2012 and May 2015 respectively. On the basis of extensive interviews and participant observation, this article demonstrates how although both parliamentary and presidential elections in Abkhazia are competitive, they favour the titular nation, while in homogeneous Nagorny Karabakh fear of a renewed conflagration has until recently produced relatively uncompetitive presidential contests. The dynamics of majoritarian versus party list, party, ethnic and gender representation are examined in each case. The case studies reveal weak political parties, but the NKR has made incremental changes to the electoral law that might encourage a less personality-based parliamentary system.

Whose media, whose agenda? Monitoring the Malawi 2014 tripartite elections

In 2014 Malawi experienced its first-ever tripartite elections involving presidential, parliamentary and local government contests. The role of the media was monitored in a major operation covering radio, television, newspapers, news websites and social media. The results revealed that, with the exception of state-controlled media, news outlets played a broadly positive role, providing fair coverage for the four leading candidates and reporting on a broad range of topics. Social media provided a lively platform for the views and opinions of mainly partisan participants (presumably mostly from the urban elite). On the negative side, coverage of the presidential and to a lesser extent the parliamentary contests dominated, so that the amount of news about local government issues was minimal. The most important negative aspect of the campaign was the one-sided coverage provided by the two state radio channels, the state television station and its online news service.

THE FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL AND PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, 2012

The victory of François Hollande over Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of the 2012 presidential election was the first success for the left in France's top political contest since François Mitterrand's re-election in 1988 and brought to an end a run of three straight defeats for the Socialists (1995, 2002 and 2007). The final result was no great surprise. While the two main contenders had vigorously fought to occupy the lead position in the first round of voting, for several months Hollande had consistently been the clear leader in the opinion polls to win the decisive second round run-off. Sarkozy was the first incumbent candidate not to gain pole position in the first round and only the second not to secure re-election, emulating the failure of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the 1981 contest against Mitterrand. Hollande's election was followed by a clear victory for the left in the parliamentary contest in June, with the Socialist party and its closest allies gaining an overall majority without the need for the support of other groups on the left such as Europe Écologie-Les Verts (the Greens) and the Front de gauche (a leftist coalition that included the Communists). President Hollande thus obtained strong parliamentary backing for his reform agenda, while the regime's dominant institutional model based on mutually supportive presidential and parliamentary majorities now worked in favour of the left as it had for the right in 2002 and 2007 (Levy and Skach 2008). Indeed, with the Socialist party also controlling the Senate and the overwhelming majority of regional and departmental councils, Hollande benefited from a more dominant position in the French political system than even Mitterrand had enjoyed when the Socialists first won the presidency in 1981.

The Kenyan Elections of 2007: An Introduction

The importance of the Kenya crisis for the African continent is not that Kenya may become ‘another Rwanda’, but that it reveals how fragile Africa's new multi-party systems may be when weak institutions, historical grievances, the normalization of violence, and a lack of elite consensus on the ‘rules of the game’, collide. This paper provides an overview of the election campaign and the results, highlighting the major areas of continuity and change with Kenya's recent past, and identifying the key dynamics within the presidential and parliamentary contests. In doing so, it focuses on the ongoing process of coalition-building that underpinned both the rise and fall of NaRC and the emergence of Odinga as a major political player. I suggest that an appreciation of the difficulties of coalition building central to understanding the campaign and the results, and will be key to any long-term resolution of the Kenya crisis.

Direct Presidential Elections and Turnout in Parliamentary Contests

The method of electing the head of state in a parliamentary system is a critical constitutional matter. A popular argument made is that allowing direct presidential elections strengthens democratic practices. Another argument posits that multiplying the number of political contests may fatigue voters and decrease their participation levels. This article considers electoral turnout in a global sample of parliamentary democracies with a nonhereditary head of state from 1945 to 2006 and finds that direct presidential elections decrease turnout in parliamentary elections by about 7 percentage points. This effect is stronger than that of most existing explanations of turnout.

Incompetence, Alienation, or Calculation?

This article focuses on the casting of invalid ballots and voting for extra-parliamentary parties. Drawing on evidence from more than 200 elections in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas during the 1980-2000 period, it tests how well four sets of factors serve as explanations for the extent of such behavior in parliamentary contests. The main finding is that the structure of political competition provides an important explanation for extra-parliamentary voting and, in particular, the number of invalid ballots. Thus, rather than being the unfortunate circumstances of an uninformed or incompetent electorate, these forms of voting, to a large extent, appear to reflect a political situation that offers voters little effective choice in the form of clear alternatives.

Ukraine's 1999 Presidential Election: A Spatial Analysis

An international team of researchers reports a metric multidimensional spatial analysis of the 1999 Ukrainian presidential election. Using data from a nationwide pre-election poll (N=1521), they estimate the spatial positions of the eight leading contenders for that office along with respondent ideal points in that same space. Voters' perceptions in the western and eastern halves of the country are compared. Results are compared with those of the 1998 parliamentary contests, reported earlier. Alternative models of voting criteria—contrasting issue-centered with personality-centered voting—are presented and applied.

The Bucharest Syndrome

The Bucharest Syndrome Vladimir Tismaneanu (bio) and Dorin Tudoran (bio) Almost three years after the December 1989 overthrow of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaueşscu and two-and-a-half years after the partially free elections of May 1990, Romanians went to the polls early in the autumn of 1992 to choose a president and parliament under their country's new noncommunist constitution. Public opinion polling done around the beginning of September had promised a tight race between the incumbent president, ex-communist Ion Iliescu of the Democratic National Salvation Front (DNSF), and his leading challenger, Emil Constantinescu of the Democratic Convention of Romania (DCR). In the first round of presidential balloting on September 27, however, Iliescu won 47 percent of the vote—less than the 50 percent he needed to win the presidency outright, but enough to put him comfortably ahead of Constantinescu's 31 percent and the 11 percent won by ultranationalist Gheorghe Funar of the Party of Romanian National Unity (PRNU). Turnout was high, with over 73 percent of eligible voters casting ballots. Iliescu's relatively strong showing at the top of the ticket did little to help his party's list of legislative candidates, which managed to poll only about 28 percent of the total votes cast in races for the 341-member House of Deputies and 143-member Senate, seats in both of which are allocated according to a complex set of rules based mainly on proportional representation with a 3-percent minimum threshold. The DCR list, meanwhile, picked up 20 percent, gleaning almost twice as [End Page 41] many votes as the party that came in third in the parliamentary contest, the National Salvation Front (NSF) of former prime minister and erstwhile Iliescu ally Petre Roman. In the presidential run-off held on October 11, Iliescu defeated Constantinescu by a total of 61 to 39 percent. A geologist and the current rector of the University of Bucharest, Constantinescu was supported by the 17 opposition parties and civic movements that had banded loosely together to form the DCR before the February 1992 local elections. Having done surprisingly well (especially in the big cities) in those local races, the DCR saw its prospects brighten even more when growing personal and political tensions between Roman and Iliescu burst into public view later that spring and caused a formal split in the ruling NSF, the group of former communists who had taken the reins of power from Ceauşescu in 1989. The development of this rift looked like a godsend to the democratic opposition, which coalesced behind Constantinescu in June and seemed poised to make large gains in the upcoming balloting. In the event, however, the fall 1992 elections resulted in a stalemate: with neither the opposition nor the DNSF able to muster even 30 percent of the vote, nationalist groupings like the PRNU and the Romania Mare (Greater Romania) party became powerbrokers. Widely seen abroad as a disappointing setback for democracy, Iliescu's landslide victory in the presidential run-off presented the strange spectacle of majority support rallying behind an unrepentant ex-communist in a country with a long history of suffering under communist tyranny of the worst sort. Iliescu preaches—and may even believe in—what he calls "original democracy," by which he seems to mean something similar to J.L. Talmon's famous definition of "totalitarian democracy" as "dictatorship resting on popular enthusiasm."1 Needless to say, such a conception leaves little room for the political pluralism that citizens of Western countries have long taken for granted as an essential feature of democracy. The Legacy of Ceauşescu To understand the peculiar political situation that prevails today, one must take into account the character of Ceauşescu's rule, which endured for a quarter-century and had a massive impact on everything that happened in Romania, up to and including the violent upheaval that cost him his power and his life. The Ceauşescu regime was characterized by harsh Stalinist controls on social, cultural, and economic life; an all-pervasive cult of personality focused on the ruler; draconian austerity measures; and an explosive combination of mass discontent and official brutality. In the years following his rise...